Twenty years of eager waiting from fans, five years of manual drawing by animators. And now lies Avatar Aang: The Last Airbendersix months before the long-awaited release, suddenly hit the streets. It’s one of the biggest leaks in recent Hollywood history. Fans are faced with a choice: do you watch or not?
Avatar: The Last Airbender was a worldwide popular animated series in 2005. A group of heroes fought against a dictatorship in a magical one Asian fusion-world. That world was divided into realms whose inhabitants could each telekinetically control one element – fire, water, earth or air. But the ‘Fire Nation’ wanted sole rule. And tried to eradicate all other elements. It’s up to Avatar Aang to stop them. Genocide is always a rewarding subject for children’s series – see also Harry Potter.
The series stopped in 2008 but remained popular: millions of people rewatched the series on Netflix, especially during corona. And all the while, fans wonder how Aang fared after the war. Of Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender that question is answered.
The film would be released on the Paramount+ streaming service in October. But a week and a half ago the full film was leaked, in HD.
We know from previous cases that such a leak cannot be closed. Leaked films and series like The Revenant, Zero Dark Thirty, Game of Thrones and Orange is the New Black were also viewed millions of times before its official release years ago.
And indeed: at the time of writing it is Avatar Appointment one of the most popular downloads in the illegal circuit. In the top 100 of illegal video material The Pirate Bay – the pirate oasis of the internet – the film ranks fourth worldwide.
On X and TikTok it is almost difficult not to see any leaked images once the algorithm has unraveled that you are a fan. So the old question arises again: to watch, or not to watch?
Theft
In any case, the law is clear: piracy is illegal. Uploading, downloading and also streaming are copyright violations – whether what you download has been leaked or is on Netflix.
Piracy rarely leads to criminal prosecution, but it does lead to civil cases. Uploaders previously had to pay 15,000 euros to rightful ownersdownloaders several hundred or thousands of euros.
Yet a huge portion of the population does not consider piracy an issue. About 14 percent of Europeans download, upload or stream illegal material, emerged from a study by the European Union. Much more shocking: 65 percent of respondents find piracy acceptable, provided they cannot easily find the stolen content on a regular (legal) streaming service.
The argument goes something like this: piracy is theft, but not expropriation. That is, when you download something, you don’t deprive the rightful owner of anything, except your future purchase of a movie ticket or album. So the idea with internet pirates is: if I would never (be able to) buy a ticket anyway, piracy doesn’t hurt anyone. This argument goes around for Avatar Appointment. “No one who watches the leaked version would have watched the film on Paramount+,” the film trade magazine quotes The Hollywood Reporter a fan.
In addition, there are even moral arguments in favor of piracy. For example, there are people who illegally download music from ‘cancelled’ artists such as R. Kelly or Kanye West – so you still enjoy the music, but the artist does not make any money from it.
And there are cases when illegal downloads help a movie or series. Then HBO series Game of Thrones broke all piracy records over ten years ago, the CEO of parent company Time Warner responded laconically: “Our experience is that it leads to more [markt]penetration, more paying users, more health for HBO, less dependence on paid promotion.”
Cyber thieves interpret it this way: by stealing you actually help the makers. The Robin Hood argument, so to speak.
Burn in hell
This also applies to some The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender. Parent company Paramount Skydance planned to release the film only on its streaming service Paramount+. Betrayal, say fans: the film belongs in the cinema.
“You finance this kind of animation, and then you throw it to death [streaming]platform without any fucking promotion?”, said a fan The Hollywood Reporter.
When in doubt: listen to the makers themselves. Animator Tom Barkel worked on the film. He understands the anger at Paramount: the film’s release was “neutered by both Paramount+ and the hotties.” Still, he asks fans to “support” the film upon its release. Illegal copies threaten the livelihoods of artists, who already have to contend with the job-eating monster of artificial intelligence.
Other crew members call it “disrespectful,” “heartbreaking,” “theft” and “inhumane” to deprive the filmmakers of their crowning moment. Artist Il Kwang Kim sums up the sentiment: “May the goodies burn in hell.”
